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Yes, Steve Jobs was a Micromanager
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky might not be, but Jobs absolutely was
Now that I’m finally back in startup mode since parting ways with IBM², I was especially interested in John Gruber’s Daring Fireball post about the term ‘Founder Mode.’ Paul Graham, co-founder of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, coined the term after hearing Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky give a talk at a YC event. Gruber’s post linked to an episode of The Verge’s Decoder podcast featuring Chesky.
During the episode, Decoder host Nilay Patel covered a lot of ground with Chesky. After a fairly deep dive into Airbnb’s business model, structure, and operations, Patel finally steered the conversation to Founder Mode. Chesky said the term is widely misunderstood: “They think it means swagger. I remember a tweet said, like, I’m going Founder Mode on this burrito. I don’t know what that means, you know?” Instead, he defined it as: “Founder Mode in, like, a couple of sentences, it’s being in the details. It’s that great leadership is presence, not absence.”
The whole interview is great, and Chesky comes across as a far above-average CEO. I found myself agreeing with almost everything he said until he made the distinction between Founder Mode’s detail-oriented approach and micromanaging. He explained that he had studied how Steve Jobs…
